The One Hundred Years of Lenni and Margot, Marianne Cronin [top fiction books of all time txt] 📗

I sensed that Humphrey felt sorry for me, that he wanted to cheer me up, so we went for a drive to Coventry and, splitting up inside Rackhams, he went to buy his first morning suit, and I went to buy my second wedding dress.

The women’s department was empty and without any windows. It felt like I’d wandered into the gently lit night with only racks and rails of quiet clothing for company. A saleswoman spotted me browsing and came over. Feeling instantly like I was under suspicion of stealing, I tried to act very normally.

‘Can I help?’ She smiled.

‘I’m going to a wedding,’ I said. I don’t know why I said it like that.

‘Oh, lovely,’ she said, ‘when is it?’

‘Next weekend.’

She made an ‘ooh’ face and sucked air into her mouth. Clearly it was far too late to be shopping for a dress for an event happening so soon. I decided I’d made the right choice in not telling her that it was my own wedding I’d be attending.

‘Well, let’s see,’ she said, looking me up and down. ‘Do you have any preferred colours?’

‘Not white,’ I said.

And she laughed as though I’d just admitted to being quite partial to oxygen. ‘Well, of course!’ she said, putting her hand to her head at the mere suggestion that I, as a wedding guest, might wear white to someone else’s wedding.

‘Do you mind?’ she asked.

‘No, not at all,’ I said, not knowing what I was consenting to. But it became clear when she started picking up dresses from the various rails, and in a matter of minutes she was holding at least ten coat hangers with dresses in reds, greens, blues. My own hands were empty.

‘Shall we?’ she asked, and I followed her into the dressing room.

I got the sense I might have been the first person she’d spoken to that day.

The first few dresses I tried on were terrible – a pillar-box red thing that hung in all the wrong places, a shiny green satin tube. I felt uncomfortable that now we’d started this sartorial journey together, the sales assistant was loath to leave my side. She kept knocking on the curtain while singing ‘knock knock!’ and asking to see. The fourth, or perhaps fifth dress was the only one which I felt I could show her. It was navy blue with sleeves to the elbow, and it flared out ever so slightly at the knee. When I moved, it swished.

The saleswoman kindly got me a blue fascinator to clip in my hair, and a fuzzy blue cardigan that fell to the same place on my arm as the dress.

‘Perfect,’ she said as I looked at myself in the mirror. I wanted to thank her for helping me find my wedding dress, but I couldn’t break the artifice, so I just thanked her as she put the dress into a bag for me.

I told her, ‘The bride will love it.’

I found Humphrey in the shopping centre café, sipping some tea and craning his neck up at the ceiling, to see the cold blue sky through the high glass roof.

‘Well?’ he asked.

‘Success!’ I said, pointing to my bag.

‘Mm,’ he said, swallowing some tea, ‘me too. If it’s not too taboo to tell you, I decided to go for blue.’

The night before the wedding, Humphrey stayed the night with his friend Al. ‘The suspense!’ he said with mock drama as we kissed goodbye at the door. ‘See you at the end of the aisle!’ he shouted as he got into Al’s car, clutching his suit bag.

The morning of my second wedding, I made myself toast and marmalade and a cup of tea. The house felt curiously still without Humphrey trampling around, moving things about and generally making a mess. I curled my hair and carefully applied my make-up. I picked the pale pink lipstick that had once lived on a pile of books in a bedsit in London, and fortunately it still worked.

I walked myself to the church, and the vicar gave me a handshake and a warm smile. He invited me to wait in the little room to the side. He asked if there would be anyone else coming who might want to wait with me. I tried not to feel sad as I told him it was just me.

And so, I waited. I’d arrived far too early, and all I had in the side room for company were some detached pews and some Bibles.

And then the door opened and there she stood.

I tried to breathe in and swallow at the same time and I started to choke. I was wearing the white lace gloves my mother had made me for my first wedding. I didn’t want to cough into them so I tried to pull them off, but they were too tight. Meena stepped forward and held her order of service pamphlet out, just in time for me to cough a lump of mint green phlegm onto the Wedding of Margot Macrae and Humphrey James.

I was apologizing while she was laughing.

I regained my breath; I took her in properly. Her hair, which was still blonde and wavy, was pinned to the back of her neck. Her face was much the same as I remembered, though a little fuller. And her pink dress hung just past her knees, effortlessly skimming her considerable bump.

For what felt like just long enough to make it real, I had the thought that I could take her hand and we could run – go to a life somewhere far away where she could be mine.

And then she smiled and the thought fell away and was replaced with the image of Humphrey’s hand on mine as we lay in bed and watched the stars.

Despite being old enough to have been a mother for many years, she looked like a teenager in trouble. She gave me a shrug and a smile, and I remembered how looking into her eyes would